GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST
Galsworthy is an artist before he is a social reformer. It is a mistake to consider him chiefly from the second point of view; for he is not so much a thinker spreading his propaganda by artistic methods as an artist whose excellence is grounded in ideas. Strife, for instance, was not written to expose the evils of our present industrial system so much as from the impulse to create, grounding itself in an economic problem—which the artist displays and analyses, just as others, and he at other times, would display and analyse any problem of love, manners, life, or human nature, in the name of “plot.”
For this reason his propaganda interferes very little with his art. Moreover, it is a general propaganda, which lends itself more directly to artistic purposes than a particular one. It would be far more difficult, for instance, to write a human and artistic novel on the evils of leaded glaze than it would be to write one on the selfish stupidity of which leaded glaze is the result. Galsworthy does not attack, at least in force, any definite abuses, he attacks those cruel and stupid powers which are at the bottom of them all—the love of property for property’s sake, the false respectability of the unassailed, the lack of comprehension of one class for another, Pharisaism, materialism, selfishness, and cowardice. He is the champion of the bottom dog, whether human or animal. He pleads passionately for sympathy with the abused and downtrodden and outcast. His throbbing pity vitalises his propaganda, so that it not only ceases to constrict his art, but positively enriches it.
When he is at his best we find a perfect blending of art and idea. The second is bound up in the first, an essential part of it. As he himself says in Some Platitudes concerning Drama: “A drama must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character has its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day.”
This ideal is completely fulfilled in Strife and The Silver Box, also in Fraternity, The Man of Property, and some of the sketches—hence it is in these that we must look for his best work. Now and then the idea carries away the artist, warping his vision, and we have instances of special pleading, such as Justice, The Fugitive, and The Island Pharisees.
In a sense Galsworthy’s propaganda is a part of his technical equipment. He uses it chiefly in laying his bases; the solidity and centralisation of his work is due largely to the economic and social ideas on which he rears the structure of human passion and frailty. He does not make Shaw’s mistake of using dialogue, rather than situation, as a means of propaganda, neither does he rely much on character. His moral is inherent in his situations, and he fails only when he lets it stray from the basic idea into the super-structure of character and dialogue.
As an artist pure and simple his chief assets are a sense of situation, a sense of atmosphere, and the power of presenting both beautifully. His sense of character is not particularly wide or profound. He deals with types rather than individuals, and the same types repeat themselves a trifle monotonously. Though he has great gifts of intuition, and occasional penetrating flashes, he does not work much below the surface. It is astonishing, when one considers the force and passion of so much of his work, to realise that it is all got from surface-workings—not that he ever suggests the shallow or superficial, it is simply a reluctance to dig.
Take, for example, Miltoun, in The Patrician; here he has attempted to draw a character whose actions spring from the inmost recesses of his being, and the result is a certain unconvincingness marring a fine achievement, for Galsworthy can penetrate only in swift spasms of intuition, and the delineation of a character like Miltoun’s requires no spasmodic descent, but a perpetual working in the buried and profound. Galsworthy is a psychological analyst of some skill; he is sensitive to psychological variations, but he catches these only in their exterior manifestations, and the result is not so much a lack of profundity as a lack of grip. For this reason his characters, charming as they sometimes are, interesting as they always are, never succeed in being absolutely Life—we never come to know them really intimately, they are more acquaintances than friends.
This surface-working in character is liable to impair situation, since the two are interdependent. Galsworthy is a master of situation, but occasionally, when the depths ought to be sounded, we are put off with a consummate skill of arrangement, a perfection of combination and interplay. This is so splendidly done that it is generally not till afterwards that we realise the lack, and this only because Galsworthy’s work so often leaves an after-taste of aloofness, that, as every lover of Galsworthy knows he is not aloof, one sees that something must be wrong with the art which gives such an impression.
Critics speak of Galsworthy’s detachment, but the true lover knows this is not so. The sense of aloofness is due partly to his scrupulous fairness in examining every point of view, partly to an exaggerated restraint, and a shrinking from analyses which are not purely intellectual. One often wishes that he would give himself rein. It is not from lack of power that he holds himself in, it seems to be rather from a certain shyness, a fastidious shrinking from troubling the depths or breaking the gates. On the rare occasions he gives himself freedom, we are struck by the force and vitality of it all. Strange as it may seem in one who has been so often accused of coldness, he is masterly in conveying the charged atmosphere of passion. It is true that he writes with restraint, with almost too much restraint, but he has a wonderful power of suggesting the heavy sweetness of passion, its joys, its languors, its delicacies rather than its ferocities.